UNEDITABLE

Preface

I wrote this book because I know what it is to be sincere and still be wrong.

For years, I believed I was following the biblical Christ. In reality, I was following a Jesus I had shaped to fit my own preferences, my own excuses, and my own sense of balance.

He gave me room to justify my behavior. He allowed me to believe my thinking was sound. He let me look at the deeper surrender of others and quietly conclude they were doing too much. Church mattered, of course — but only within the limits I found reasonable. And in the end, I lived much of my life exactly as I had determined was best.

That is not discipleship.

That is self-rule dressed in the language of faith.

What finally exposed this in me was not theology. It was life.

In some areas, I realized I had built a Jesus who excused what the real Jesus would have confronted. In other areas, I had settled for regret when what I truly needed was repentance. Then the 2008 recession came. My family and I stood at the brink of ruin, and everything I thought I controlled was stripped away. I was forced to face the truth: Jesus was not asking for partial influence. He was asking for lordship. Not just over the religious parts, but over all of it.

My plans. My habits. My assumptions. My comforts. My future. Me.

So this book is not written from a distance. It is written as a confession.

It is the testimony of a man who learned, painfully but mercifully, that the Christ he had been following looked entirely too much like himself. And it is written in the hope that others might have the courage to ask the same question of themselves before it is too late.

In my first book, The Man-Made Jesus, I introduced a framework built around a simple but unsettling idea: modern Christianity had entered what I called MySavior Builder mode. Using the customization mechanics of NBA 2K as a lens, I described how we adjust the sliders of Christ’s character to suit our preferences — maxing out affirmation, lowering holiness, reducing sovereignty to a comfortable midpoint.

That was one chapter. It planted the question I could not stop asking.

Uneditable is that question followed all the way to its honest conclusion: what a customized faith actually costs, what it takes to release the version we built, and who is standing on the other side of everything we put in His place.

If this book does anything, I pray it brings you face to face with the real Jesus. Not the version culture prefers. Not the version pain invents. Not the version comfort negotiates. But the One who tells the truth, requires surrender, and actually transforms the people who follow Him.

Introduction: Which Jesus Are You Actually Following?

Something has shifted.

It did not happen overnight, and it did not announce itself. But if you have been paying attention—really paying attention—you have seen it. The Jesus being followed today looks remarkably different depending on whom you ask.

Walk into ten churches on a Sunday morning, and you will encounter ten different versions of Him. Scroll through ten social media feeds, and you will find ten more. Gentle in one room. Militant in another. Therapeutic in one feed. Political in the next.

The Jesus of popular culture has quietly become the most customizable figure in human history.

Christianity remains broadly acceptable. Most people are still open to the concept of God. But the terms of engagement are increasingly treated as personal. Whatever relationship you choose to have with God is considered valid. Whatever version of Jesus fits your life becomes the one worth following.

And the church, rather than confronting that drift, has too often accommodated it.

Congregations have been redesigned around the preferences of the people walking through the doors rather than the God who owns them. Services have become productions. Sermons have become performances. Messages that once carried the weight of transformation increasingly sound closer to self-help than Scripture.

The goal is no longer to offend sin. It is to offend no one.

"If everyone is following Jesus, but nobody can agree on who He is, is it possible that most of us are actually following a version of Him we built ourselves?"

This drift did not begin with bad intentions. Much of it began with the desire to be understood—to make the church accessible, relatable, and relevant to a culture moving fast and losing interest.

But somewhere in that pursuit, something foundational was set aside. The church stopped treating Scripture as sufficient.

Not officially. Not through an announcement. Functionally—in the way sermons were planned, difficult passages disappeared, and biblical authority was weighed against cultural acceptability. The Bible became a resource to consult rather than an authority to submit to.

Once that happened, everything downstream began to shift. When Scripture loses its authority, the knowledge of God becomes negotiable. Who He is, what He requires, and how He moves become subject to interpretations shaped more by preference than revelation.

Chapter 1: The Archetype

Before you knew anything specific about them, you already knew what type of person they were.

Think about the last time someone described a person to you before you met them. Not a full biography, just a few words: She is the life of the party. He always has it together. She would give you the shirt off her back.

Before you exchanged a word with them, something formed in your mind—a framework, a set of expectations, an idea of how they would behave, what they would prioritize, and how they might respond when life became difficult.

That framework has a name: archetype.

An archetype is not a complete picture of a person. It is a template, a predetermined category that shapes expectation before the full story is known. We assign them instinctively: the leader, the peacemaker, the skeptic, the caretaker. The human mind categorizes before it fully understands.

That is what makes archetypes useful. It is also what makes them dangerous.

NBA 2K developers understood something about human nature when they built the archetype system into the player builder. Before you touch a slider, adjust an attribute, or equip a badge, the game requires the most foundational decision of the entire build:

What type of player do you want to be?

Two-Way Slasher. Sharpshooter. Playmaker. Paint Beast.

Each archetype comes with predetermined strengths, built-in limitations, and an identity that shapes every decision that follows. The game gives you room to customize, but only within the boundaries established by that first choice.

"You build someone who looks legitimate—a player with a position, a jersey, a name, and the ability to take the court. But what you have really built is your own desires in somebody else’s uniform."

Now stay with me. Because somewhere along the way—through the cultural drift, the softened sermons, the therapeutic language, and the gospel of invitation without confrontation—we did the same thing to Jesus.

We sat down at the builder screen, looked at everything Scripture says Jesus is, and began making decisions. This attribute stays. This one gets lowered. This part of His character fits the life I am trying to live. This one does not.

This book is about that build—how it happened, what it is costing us, and what it takes to tear it down and come face to face with the Jesus we have been editing, the One who was never ours to customize in the first place.